GP didn't sayhe was. GP said that he was a person who committed great evil that does not appear to have been motivated by "nutjob religious ideas".
He strongly implied it by concluding with "Atheists are capable of the worst atrocities by making Gods of themselves".
Even if you are right - if someone says "some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God", then saying that some others weren't doesn't counter that.
And by counter, I mean showing that people's lack of belief is just as likely to cause them to commit evil, than a belief in God is. Clearly no one is saying that religion is uniquely bad - there are other bad things in this world, such as AIDS, terrorism etc. Saying that these are bad too hardly helps defend religion! The question under debate here is whether we are better off with or without religious belief.
I'm not making any comment on what is "default". I'm just saying they're not comparable - you have "bringing up children to believe in something despite evidence" and "bringing up people in a manner different to the culture of that society".
What do you mean by "raising a child atheist"?
The comparable thing here would be telling a child not to believe in God. Does that happen often though? I don't see schools legally required to preach children not to believe in God; I don't see clubs/societies to preach atheism to children. I don't think atheism parents are likely to preach it to their children on the same scale that some religious parents do.
If you dropped 1000 small children on a desert island and came back in 20 years, the survivors will probably have invented some kind of religion, even if none of them had any religious upbringing previously.
You've just proven my point. If I understood correctly, your point was that children brought up in a secular society will be atheists, so are no better or wiser than Christians brought up in a Christian society. Yet here, you admit that even if a society starts of secular, people will invent religion.
But again, I stand by my original point - in much of Europe, despite being secular, our children are often not brought up as atheists. Rather, they are brainwashed with Christianity, yet many turn out atheists nonetheless.
What was great about this site is that it linked to places that had sufficient bandwidth for you to watch in real time. I mean sure, we all know about Bittorrent, but that takes hours to download an episode. This allowed me to use the Internet as a TV.
I had no idea it was based in the UK. This is the land where everyone has to pay a licence fee - £135 a year - just to own a TV. FFS, I mainly used it to pay for material either produced by or available on the BBC. And yeah, I've illegally downloaded 24 - since the cable company I pay £25 a month (Virgin Media) to decided to cancel Sky because they decided 3p a day was too much for it, but since then, they've given us nothing in return.
I'm also annoyed that whilst the BBC have a great number of shows in their back catalogue, all funded by licence payers, rather then putting these on an extra digital channel for us UK viewers, instead they sell them off to other companies (mainly UKTV Gold). So to summarise: we have to pay once via the licence fee, we pay again to get hold of the same content via UKTV Gold, and on top of that, we get advertising too.
Whilst I've downloaded music, I'll admit it's because I can get away with it, and not something I can really justify ethically. But with TV, I'm paying £135 a year, then money on top of that to a cable/satellite company, often just to get the same content, and then when I find I can only get my favourite shows by downloading, I'm told I'm a pirate costing them money!
Maybe when the BBC stops "stealing" money off of UK citizens, we can talk about us "stealing" shows from TV companies.
So I'm currenly paying £435 a year for TV, and getting increasingly little value for it. If a company was available to offer legal Internet viewing of shows, that's how much I, and I imagine many others, would be willing to pay for it - I'd switch in an instant.
(FWIW, I also recently bought the entire Blackadder series on DVD after seeing a few episodes on TV Links, and remembering how much I liked it.)
Since atheism appears to be a relatively recent concept (< 500 years), how would you back up the claim that morality is a concept that came before religion?
Atheism as a concept and term is relatively recent, but that doesn't mean that no one before that didn't believe in God! Clearly at some point along the line, we started believing in God, and started being religious. Unless you think that all our animal ancestors were religious too.
I don't know what the OP meant, but I think a difference should be noted between belief and religion - or at least, organised religion.
Individuals should be free to believe what they like. But I do think at least that the world would be a better place without organised religions that are still politically associated with Governments (e.g., countries like the UK are still officially Christian), that still have a legal right to have their religion pushed onto people (e.g., prayers and worship in state schools in the UK), that are able to lobby and influence Governments into bringing in laws based on their religious beliefs, and where what they preach is taken as truth by millions if not billions of people (e.g., the pope).
It makes perfect sense. If children can be brought up to believe in religion despite a lack of factual evidence, why can't people be brought up atheist in culture that, while officially Christian, contains far fewer believers than a purportedly secular society like America?
I don't see these as being comparable things. The comparison to the former would be bringing up children to be atheists, despite clear evidence of existence of God. Which obviously we don't have an example of.
I'm not sure what entails being brought up as an atheist, anymore than being brought up as someone who doesn't believe in Zeus, fairies or the almighty FSM.
1. Hitler was not an atheist. I don't know why this myth keeps coming up so often. His religious beliefs are unclear, but he referred to "God" at various times, and there seems to be no evidence of him actually being an atheist.
2. The claim is not "some people who happened to be theists also did bad things", but rather that "people did bad things in the name of their religious belief". If you want to counter that, you need to show how someone's lack of belief caused them to do bad things.
Many long-distance trains in the UK have a "quiet coach" where they ask people not to use mobile phones, personal stereos, children etc.
This is a good idea, though I was annoyed one time when I reserved seats, and they put us in the quiet coach without asking. Everytime someone made a quiet phone call, this guy came over to complain at them, saying "Excuse me, when I want to make a phone call, I go to the end of the carriage". I guess it's nice that he wanted to uphold the rules, but I was more disturbed by that than the phone calls - I felt like saying to him "Excuse me, when I want to complain to someone, I go to the end of the carriage"...
Do you really think you're an atheist because of some great factual insight on your part, or because you grew up acculturated to an extremely atheistic society? How can you consider yourself any better or wiser than the American kid who gets sent to Jesus camp?
I'm an atheist, because I've yet to see evidence to persuade me of existence of God - or alternatively, I didn't grow up acculturated to a theistic society.
Saying that me not believing in God is caused by secular society makes no more sense than saying me not believing in fairies is caused by living in a society that doesn't promote a belief in fairies.
It should also be added that, whilst European countries may be "secular" in the simple sense of having more atheists, many are most certainly not secular in any political sense. Unlike the US, many (all?) countries have no separation of Church and state, and countries such as the UK are legally required to have daily Christian worship in all schools, even state ones.
So in fact, I'm an atheist despite growing up in a society that, despite the significant proportion of non-believers - still pushes religion everywhere, including onto young children.
I completed deleted an obvious joke entry that was reverted numerous times. It was like a tug-of-war between me and the bot, and I finally won.
You can't delete entries (unless you're an admin) - so I presume by "completed deleted", you mean you blanked the page, which isn't the way to handle these things, and so the bot was behaviour quite correct. (There are various methods to propose deleting an article - if you don't know how to do that, you could always leave a comment on the Talk page, and let someone else do it.)
Isn't that the Mac? Macs popularity has risen the latest article has Macs at 8.5% market share. OS X is based of BSD and the new version is officially considered Unix. Much of the core is from open source products. Macs are probably the closest thing you will get to your utopian OS
So it's the Mac, except for the popularity of Windows, and the openness and price point of Linux.
You might as well say it's Windows, because it has all the features he wants, except for the ones it doesn't...
As others have said, it may will be correct to call this piracy - just because something is free to download, doesn't mean it is legal to redistribute.
However, Forbes are being particularly idiotic by referring to it as stealing. What exactly is being stolen?
There was no emphasis on DirectX in GPU Gems 2 (which I only recently bought, dammit!), and I suspect there won't be in this book either - the book's are basically a collection of essays, and it's the choice of the individual author.
Also this is a GPU programming book, so the shading language is more relevant than the API (if you don't even know the required OpenGL or DirectX commands to set up shaders, these books aren't for you). And again, GPU Gems 2 at least varies between Cg, HLSL and GLSL. It's not like there's much difference - the point of books like these is to teach algorithms and best practices. It's not a book to teach you a shading language.
Let me think back at the university - how many there who would use heavy CAD? Maybe 200 people out of 30000, and I'm probably being kind. How many of those would pay the tens of thousands of dollars needed from each to compete with the gamers?
Given that each copy of high-end CAD software costs tens of thousands of dollars (with mid-range costing thousands), I'd say a lot of them.
Judging from your comment about your university, you appear to be thinking that the CAD market is just students tinkering on a budget copy of AutoCAD. It's not - I've no idea how big the market compares to the games industry, but computer aided design and manufacturing is a billion dollar market.
And immediate-mode API's are turning out to be too bus-heavy for that use case. Whether you like Microsoft or not, the programming model used in DX is an attempt to mitigate this. The proper response is to lobby the OpenGL ARB to add API features more amenable to modern graphics processing.
What exactly are you referring to by "features more amenable to modern graphics processing"?
OpenGL is hardly restricted to immediate mode - no one uses that if they care about performance - and things like vertex buffer objects have been around for years. Are you referring to something new in DirectX that is yet to appear in OpenGL?
The very fact that a ridiculous assertion without evidence that anyone defending Vista is an astrosurfer gets modded up shows that your claim is false.
If you want to look for a proper example of biased moderating, check out every Apple story, where any criticism gets modded down (even when the very same kind of comments on other topics get modded up), and anything positive about them gets modded up. It's the only time I have to browse at -1, because the moderation is broken on those stories.
But, in that case, does the term have any meaning???
"Failed star" isn't a scientific definition, but that doesn't mean it has no meaning. I think you are being overly-critical - this is an issue of language, not science, and the term simply refers to Jupiter being short of the mass required to form a star. No one is claiming it's a scientific classification.
Yes, if you like you can look at everything in black and white terms, but in common usage, people will often use terms to denote not making a particular category.
Are you going to feel happy meeting someone else who spends all their time in front of a computer terminal cruising facebook? I think not.
As opposed to spending all your time on Slashdot? I mean, people here probably spend more time on computers than most people:p
And I don't see why using Facebook implies excessive computer usage, any more than say, using email. The Internet is mainstream now - it's just another communication tool, like phones. Those sports club members will no doubt use the Internet, communicate via email, and have a Facebook account.
Re:Today is pregancy and infant loss awareness day
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Blog Action Day
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· Score: 1
Maybe the bloggers should pull their head out of their but... stop talking about their cats... and focus on what the day REALLY is about....by posting it to their blog? (Or Slashdot, as you are doing.)
However, I'm not sure that the entire Internet should stop just because some people have designated this a particular day. Clearly, it's not just "bloggers" who aren't focusing on this day.
(And I'm sure you mean well, but this comes across rather much as an off-topic spam to me...)
Um, the problem is that the game is banned, even for adults. I don't see anyone having a problem with enforced age restrictions to prevent children from seeing.
It's a good idea...especially if the game company made you verify your age to download the patch. Everyone is happy then - the company can release its game without (fundamental) editing, the parents can be happy because little Johnny is protected from vile evil sex/violence, and little Johnny is happy because the patch will be on TPB within 2 minutes.
Note that the BBFC's ruling is about even adults not being allowed to see it.
most blogs are day journals and have very low readership
And they shouldn't really even be compared - the only thing they have in common is the technology. The people writing them don't intend them to be read by loads of random strangers.
Also note it isn't necessarily true they get lower readership - many LiveJournals I've seen have hundreds of readers, gettings 10s-100s of comments on posts (I mean, that's even comparable to a non-front-page Slashdot post), whilst the standalone "political blogs" hardly ever get any comments.
But maybe if the game wasn't about making gruesome snuff films and sadistically murdering people, they might find it a bit more acceptable.
The only reason they got a response like that is because the Brits hate violence more than sexuality (imagine that!) and there are few, if any *redeeming* points to the game. In other words, one might be able to list the few (if any) acceptable points of the game, but the unacceptable parts are simply too numerous to list.
We may hate actual violence, but that doesn't mean we like a bunch of adults telling other adults what they're allowed to see, just because some find it "unacceptable". If you don't like it, don't play it.
Who said it was? I'm no fan of either Microsoft or Apple, nor Linux or BSD. I'm just pointing out that "eye candy" can't be seen as a universal dislike, and is something many people give praise to - just trying posting a comment on a Mac OS X article about "CPU hogging eye-candy" and watch the post get modded down.
Slashdot Mirror
GP didn't sayhe was. GP said that he was a person who committed great evil that does not appear to have been motivated by "nutjob religious ideas".
He strongly implied it by concluding with "Atheists are capable of the worst atrocities by making Gods of themselves".
Even if you are right - if someone says "some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God", then saying that some others weren't doesn't counter that.
And by counter, I mean showing that people's lack of belief is just as likely to cause them to commit evil, than a belief in God is. Clearly no one is saying that religion is uniquely bad - there are other bad things in this world, such as AIDS, terrorism etc. Saying that these are bad too hardly helps defend religion! The question under debate here is whether we are better off with or without religious belief.
I'm not making any comment on what is "default". I'm just saying they're not comparable - you have "bringing up children to believe in something despite evidence" and "bringing up people in a manner different to the culture of that society".
What do you mean by "raising a child atheist"?
The comparable thing here would be telling a child not to believe in God. Does that happen often though? I don't see schools legally required to preach children not to believe in God; I don't see clubs/societies to preach atheism to children. I don't think atheism parents are likely to preach it to their children on the same scale that some religious parents do.
If you dropped 1000 small children on a desert island and came back in 20 years, the survivors will probably have invented some kind of religion, even if none of them had any religious upbringing previously.
You've just proven my point. If I understood correctly, your point was that children brought up in a secular society will be atheists, so are no better or wiser than Christians brought up in a Christian society. Yet here, you admit that even if a society starts of secular, people will invent religion.
But again, I stand by my original point - in much of Europe, despite being secular, our children are often not brought up as atheists. Rather, they are brainwashed with Christianity, yet many turn out atheists nonetheless.
What was great about this site is that it linked to places that had sufficient bandwidth for you to watch in real time. I mean sure, we all know about Bittorrent, but that takes hours to download an episode. This allowed me to use the Internet as a TV.
I had no idea it was based in the UK. This is the land where everyone has to pay a licence fee - £135 a year - just to own a TV. FFS, I mainly used it to pay for material either produced by or available on the BBC. And yeah, I've illegally downloaded 24 - since the cable company I pay £25 a month (Virgin Media) to decided to cancel Sky because they decided 3p a day was too much for it, but since then, they've given us nothing in return.
I'm also annoyed that whilst the BBC have a great number of shows in their back catalogue, all funded by licence payers, rather then putting these on an extra digital channel for us UK viewers, instead they sell them off to other companies (mainly UKTV Gold). So to summarise: we have to pay once via the licence fee, we pay again to get hold of the same content via UKTV Gold, and on top of that, we get advertising too.
Whilst I've downloaded music, I'll admit it's because I can get away with it, and not something I can really justify ethically. But with TV, I'm paying £135 a year, then money on top of that to a cable/satellite company, often just to get the same content, and then when I find I can only get my favourite shows by downloading, I'm told I'm a pirate costing them money!
Maybe when the BBC stops "stealing" money off of UK citizens, we can talk about us "stealing" shows from TV companies.
So I'm currenly paying £435 a year for TV, and getting increasingly little value for it. If a company was available to offer legal Internet viewing of shows, that's how much I, and I imagine many others, would be willing to pay for it - I'd switch in an instant.
(FWIW, I also recently bought the entire Blackadder series on DVD after seeing a few episodes on TV Links, and remembering how much I liked it.)
Since atheism appears to be a relatively recent concept (< 500 years), how would you back up the claim that morality is a concept that came before religion?
Atheism as a concept and term is relatively recent, but that doesn't mean that no one before that didn't believe in God! Clearly at some point along the line, we started believing in God, and started being religious. Unless you think that all our animal ancestors were religious too.
Let's compare the post Roman world to the pre-Roman world. Prior to Christianity, the world believed in conquest without justification.
Erm, the Roman world was still religious before Christianity came along...
And it didn't take long for those Christian European nations to get back to good old conquest and pillaging.
I'm not saying he's right, but your points don't counter his argument.
I don't know what the OP meant, but I think a difference should be noted between belief and religion - or at least, organised religion.
Individuals should be free to believe what they like. But I do think at least that the world would be a better place without organised religions that are still politically associated with Governments (e.g., countries like the UK are still officially Christian), that still have a legal right to have their religion pushed onto people (e.g., prayers and worship in state schools in the UK), that are able to lobby and influence Governments into bringing in laws based on their religious beliefs, and where what they preach is taken as truth by millions if not billions of people (e.g., the pope).
It makes perfect sense. If children can be brought up to believe in religion despite a lack of factual evidence, why can't people be brought up atheist in culture that, while officially Christian, contains far fewer believers than a purportedly secular society like America?
I don't see these as being comparable things. The comparison to the former would be bringing up children to be atheists, despite clear evidence of existence of God. Which obviously we don't have an example of.
I'm not sure what entails being brought up as an atheist, anymore than being brought up as someone who doesn't believe in Zeus, fairies or the almighty FSM.
1. Hitler was not an atheist. I don't know why this myth keeps coming up so often. His religious beliefs are unclear, but he referred to "God" at various times, and there seems to be no evidence of him actually being an atheist.
2. The claim is not "some people who happened to be theists also did bad things", but rather that "people did bad things in the name of their religious belief". If you want to counter that, you need to show how someone's lack of belief caused them to do bad things.
Many long-distance trains in the UK have a "quiet coach" where they ask people not to use mobile phones, personal stereos, children etc.
This is a good idea, though I was annoyed one time when I reserved seats, and they put us in the quiet coach without asking. Everytime someone made a quiet phone call, this guy came over to complain at them, saying "Excuse me, when I want to make a phone call, I go to the end of the carriage". I guess it's nice that he wanted to uphold the rules, but I was more disturbed by that than the phone calls - I felt like saying to him "Excuse me, when I want to complain to someone, I go to the end of the carriage"...
Do you really think you're an atheist because of some great factual insight on your part, or because you grew up acculturated to an extremely atheistic society? How can you consider yourself any better or wiser than the American kid who gets sent to Jesus camp?
I'm an atheist, because I've yet to see evidence to persuade me of existence of God - or alternatively, I didn't grow up acculturated to a theistic society.
Saying that me not believing in God is caused by secular society makes no more sense than saying me not believing in fairies is caused by living in a society that doesn't promote a belief in fairies.
It should also be added that, whilst European countries may be "secular" in the simple sense of having more atheists, many are most certainly not secular in any political sense. Unlike the US, many (all?) countries have no separation of Church and state, and countries such as the UK are legally required to have daily Christian worship in all schools, even state ones.
So in fact, I'm an atheist despite growing up in a society that, despite the significant proportion of non-believers - still pushes religion everywhere, including onto young children.
I completed deleted an obvious joke entry that was reverted numerous times. It was like a tug-of-war between me and the bot, and I finally won.
You can't delete entries (unless you're an admin) - so I presume by "completed deleted", you mean you blanked the page, which isn't the way to handle these things, and so the bot was behaviour quite correct. (There are various methods to propose deleting an article - if you don't know how to do that, you could always leave a comment on the Talk page, and let someone else do it.)
Isn't that the Mac?
Macs popularity has risen the latest article has Macs at 8.5% market share. OS X is based of BSD and the new version is officially considered Unix. Much of the core is from open source products. Macs are probably the closest thing you will get to your utopian OS
So it's the Mac, except for the popularity of Windows, and the openness and price point of Linux.
You might as well say it's Windows, because it has all the features he wants, except for the ones it doesn't...
As others have said, it may will be correct to call this piracy - just because something is free to download, doesn't mean it is legal to redistribute.
However, Forbes are being particularly idiotic by referring to it as stealing. What exactly is being stolen?
There was no emphasis on DirectX in GPU Gems 2 (which I only recently bought, dammit!), and I suspect there won't be in this book either - the book's are basically a collection of essays, and it's the choice of the individual author.
Also this is a GPU programming book, so the shading language is more relevant than the API (if you don't even know the required OpenGL or DirectX commands to set up shaders, these books aren't for you). And again, GPU Gems 2 at least varies between Cg, HLSL and GLSL. It's not like there's much difference - the point of books like these is to teach algorithms and best practices. It's not a book to teach you a shading language.
Let me think back at the university - how many there who would use heavy CAD? Maybe 200 people out of 30000, and I'm probably being kind. How many of those would pay the tens of thousands of dollars needed from each to compete with the gamers?
Given that each copy of high-end CAD software costs tens of thousands of dollars (with mid-range costing thousands), I'd say a lot of them.
Judging from your comment about your university, you appear to be thinking that the CAD market is just students tinkering on a budget copy of AutoCAD. It's not - I've no idea how big the market compares to the games industry, but computer aided design and manufacturing is a billion dollar market.
And immediate-mode API's are turning out to be too bus-heavy for that use case. Whether you like Microsoft or not, the programming model used in DX is an attempt to mitigate this. The proper response is to lobby the OpenGL ARB to add API features more amenable to modern graphics processing.
What exactly are you referring to by "features more amenable to modern graphics processing"?
OpenGL is hardly restricted to immediate mode - no one uses that if they care about performance - and things like vertex buffer objects have been around for years. Are you referring to something new in DirectX that is yet to appear in OpenGL?
The very fact that a ridiculous assertion without evidence that anyone defending Vista is an astrosurfer gets modded up shows that your claim is false.
If you want to look for a proper example of biased moderating, check out every Apple story, where any criticism gets modded down (even when the very same kind of comments on other topics get modded up), and anything positive about them gets modded up. It's the only time I have to browse at -1, because the moderation is broken on those stories.
(Hey, astroturfers: mod me up will you!)
But, in that case, does the term have any meaning???
"Failed star" isn't a scientific definition, but that doesn't mean it has no meaning. I think you are being overly-critical - this is an issue of language, not science, and the term simply refers to Jupiter being short of the mass required to form a star. No one is claiming it's a scientific classification.
Yes, if you like you can look at everything in black and white terms, but in common usage, people will often use terms to denote not making a particular category.
Are you going to feel happy meeting someone else who spends all their time in front of a computer terminal cruising facebook? I think not.
:p
As opposed to spending all your time on Slashdot? I mean, people here probably spend more time on computers than most people
And I don't see why using Facebook implies excessive computer usage, any more than say, using email. The Internet is mainstream now - it's just another communication tool, like phones. Those sports club members will no doubt use the Internet, communicate via email, and have a Facebook account.
Maybe the bloggers should pull their head out of their but... stop talking about their cats... and focus on what the day REALLY is about. ...by posting it to their blog? (Or Slashdot, as you are doing.)
However, I'm not sure that the entire Internet should stop just because some people have designated this a particular day. Clearly, it's not just "bloggers" who aren't focusing on this day.
(And I'm sure you mean well, but this comes across rather much as an off-topic spam to me...)
Um, the problem is that the game is banned, even for adults. I don't see anyone having a problem with enforced age restrictions to prevent children from seeing.
It's a good idea...especially if the game company made you verify your age to download the patch. Everyone is happy then - the company can release its game without (fundamental) editing, the parents can be happy because little Johnny is protected from vile evil sex/violence, and little Johnny is happy because the patch will be on TPB within 2 minutes.
Note that the BBFC's ruling is about even adults not being allowed to see it.
most blogs are day journals and have very low readership
And they shouldn't really even be compared - the only thing they have in common is the technology. The people writing them don't intend them to be read by loads of random strangers.
Also note it isn't necessarily true they get lower readership - many LiveJournals I've seen have hundreds of readers, gettings 10s-100s of comments on posts (I mean, that's even comparable to a non-front-page Slashdot post), whilst the standalone "political blogs" hardly ever get any comments.
But maybe if the game wasn't about making gruesome snuff films and sadistically murdering people, they might find it a bit more acceptable.
The only reason they got a response like that is because the Brits hate violence more than sexuality (imagine that!) and there are few, if any *redeeming* points to the game. In other words, one might be able to list the few (if any) acceptable points of the game, but the unacceptable parts are simply too numerous to list.
We may hate actual violence, but that doesn't mean we like a bunch of adults telling other adults what they're allowed to see, just because some find it "unacceptable". If you don't like it, don't play it.
Snuff films are a myth, btw.
Who said it was? I'm no fan of either Microsoft or Apple, nor Linux or BSD. I'm just pointing out that "eye candy" can't be seen as a universal dislike, and is something many people give praise to - just trying posting a comment on a Mac OS X article about "CPU hogging eye-candy" and watch the post get modded down.